Reinvesting in a Rosenwald School

Cindy Olnick 00:00
Today on Save As…

Evelyn Robertson 00:01
So what these schools did, they created an inspiration within those young people to look beyond your present status. Look beyond you and me and do something, make something of yourself.

Cindy Olnick 00:22
Welcome to Save As: NextGen Heritage Conservation, an award winning podcast that glimpses the future of heritage conservation through the work of graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Cindy Olnick.

Trudi Sandmeier 00:36
And I’m Trudi Sandmeier. So Cindy,

Cindy Olnick 00:39
Yes, Trudi, talk to me.

Trudi Sandmeier 00:42
We have some good news to report my friends.

Cindy Olnick 00:45
Oh, right. Yeah, we they might be tired of hearing it.

Trudi Sandmeier 00:49
I know. I know. It’s an embarrassment of riches. I’m telling you people, we got another award for this award-winning podcast. This one is from the governor of the state of California, who honored Save As with one of five statewide awards this year for historic preservation. Wow. And it’s a big deal. It’s pretty darn exciting.

Cindy Olnick 01:14
So we’re gonna go out to Sacramento. We’re gonna hang out with Gavin.

Trudi Sandmeier 01:19
That’s right. We’re gonna gather in some more hardware to celebrate this amazing podcast. So we are really grateful for the governor’s attention to this and to the State Historic Preservation Officer Julie Polanco. Thank you so much for listening and honoring what we’re doing with our students. It’s really meaningful.

Cindy Olnick 01:41
And as we always say, Save As is nothing without the people whose stories we share. So thank you for all the wonderful guests who work so hard and create this great scholarship that we can then bring to the home viewer. So speaking of, today’s episode is such a family affair. This is a really great story. So Trudi, you had a cool conversation with alumna Brannon Smithwick, about something very close and personal to her.

Trudi Sandmeier 02:12
Yeah, so, Brannon, when she was a little girl, her family moved into this house in rural Tennessee that it turns out used to be a school. And it was a Rosenwald school. And that means that it was part of this network of rural schools that were built all throughout the south to serve as the local schools for the African American communities that they served. And so her house was a former schoolhouse that had been converted into residential use after the school was no longer needed after integration had happened. And they moved in there and didn’t know the story. And that kind of shaped a lot of her feelings about the built environment. And there’s a really cool story that goes along with that, but it’s kind of the jumping off place that led Brandon to this topic.

Cindy Olnick 03:09
Cool. All right. Well, let’s get to it. Here’s Trudi’s discussion with Brandon Smithwick.

Trudi Sandmeier 03:18
Welcome, Brandon to Save As. Thanks for joining us today. Why don’t you take a moment and introduce yourself?

Brannon Smithwick 03:24
Yeah, thanks for having me. My name is Brandon Smithwick. I just finished my degrees at USC studying heritage conservation and also urban planning. The title of my thesis is Educating Generations: the Legacy and Future of the Allen-White School campus, a Rosenwald school in Whitefield, Tennessee.

Trudi Sandmeier 03:42
Okay, that’s a lot of words all together. So tell me a little bit about how you arrived at this particular thesis topic.

Brannon Smithwick 03:50
Yeah, so I had kind of a unique situation growing up. I was born in Memphis, Tennessee, but when I was about two years old, my parents decided they wanted to get out of the city. And so they moved to Braden, Tennessee, which is about 45 minutes outside of Memphis and bought a house that they actually thought was built in the 60s. It was predominantly a Black rural area, all of my neighbors were of African American descent, and they would stop by and talk to my mom while I’m playing outside in my red wagon and say, oh, you know, I went to school here.

Trudi Sandmeier 04:23
So we got a chance to actually ask your mom about this.

Ann Smithwick 04:27
I’m Ann Smithwick and I’m a photographer. In the 1990s and early 2000s. My family and I made our home in a renovated Rosenwald school. It was called the Braden Sinai School. Many of our neighbors they were students and teachers at the school. And often they would drop by and share their thoughts their recollections with us. The schoolhouse clearly was an important part of their lives, and they had sentimental memories of their days spent there.

Brannon Smithwick 04:52
Hearing these people’s stories about their memories at this school was really inspiring for her so she launched this project called Rosenwald Revisited: Wisdom From The Elders.

Ann Smithwick 05:04
I began to photograph and interview these former students and faculty to thread together a sense of unity and togetherness that the community shared. I began to understand that this my home was once their haven, their playground, and in a sense their other home.

Brannon Smithwick 05:18
And it eventually kind of grew into this greater project where she started interviewing and taking portraits of students in surrounding counties, including Hardeman County, and that was the community of the Allen-White School. So that’s how I ended up landing on this specific school for my thesis as a case study to focus on because it just has such a rich and interesting history. Not that I don’t love the house that I grew up in. Those stories are amazing as well. But the Allen-White school really grew into something unique. And so I felt like I needed to focus on that for my thesis.

Trudi Sandmeier 05:51
What do you mean when you say a Rosenwald school what is that?

Brannon Smithwick 05:55
The Rosenwald schools were this joint effort between Julius Rosenwald who was a philanthropist out of Chicago, one of the cofounders of Sears and Roebuck Company, and also Booker T. Washington, who was an advocate for B-ack education at the time out of Tuskegee, where he started his own school. Booker T. Washington’s ethos was really advocating for an industrial and vocational training with the idea that that could build self-reliance in students and then launch them on this path toward economic success that all Americans, he felt deserved, and everyone deserves. The two men worked together in partnership to fund in collaboration with local communities, schools all over the American South, during the Jim Crow and the Civil Rights eras. And so it was this really important stepping stone for students to really get the education to understand the business side of it, you know, the kind of the backbone of it, how to make a living, how to own your own farm, how to do all of these things, to propel them into leadership positions moving forward later in their life.

Trudi Sandmeier 07:00
One of the people you spoke with was local leader Evelyn Robertson in the community, who was a former student, and also a teacher, and then later became the principal of the elementary school.

Evelyn Robertson 07:13
Education was looked upon, and educators were held in high esteem. And young people wanted to be like those people that they saw as being successful. And education was a way to do that. I think that when you look back on the role that these schools have played in the lives of individuals who were impacted, its immeasurable, because of how significant they were able to share in the dreams that these young people might have.

Brannon Smithwick 07:47
The Rosenwald fund really focused on partnering with communities to create challenge grants saying, Hey, if you can get X amount of money to build a school in your community and show that there’s support there, we will match that grant and sometimes surpass it in order to make this physical infrastructure happen so that it’s a long standing place for students to come and get their education.

Trudi Sandmeier 08:11
Cool.

Brannon Smithwick 08:12
Then it started out as a smaller program, and by the 1940s had grown into over 5,000 schools across 15 states in the American South.

Trudi Sandmeier 08:23
So was there a school for Black students in Whiteville at all?

Brannon Smithwick 08:29
There was only small little elementary schools but not in Whiteville. Tennessee, after the Civil War, especially this region of West Tennessee where Hardeman County is located, continued being an agricultural area. And so a lot of Black students ended up in sharecropping situations and had to work, you know, couldn’t attend school full-time didn’t have the opportunities to go to school a full term and really stay on track with their education. So a lot of small primary schools started popping up around the South, and they often, you know, took place in Black Masonic lodges, or, you know, even sometimes houses, people’s houses, Churches, yes, sometimes even barns and you know, just wherever the students could congregate and learn, it was happening. And so one of those schools that kind of sprouted up in Whitefield, Tennessee in 1905, was called the Jesse C. Allen School for Colored Children. That was started by Jesse C. Allen, who was a teacher in Hardeman. County. And it started out originally as a really small school, but in 10 years, it grew to be 200 students in one room in the Whiteville Masonic Lodge.

Trudi Sandmeier 09:13
Churches. Oh my God. That’s a lot of people in one room. Goodness.

Brannon Smithwick 09:49
It was too many people in one room. Jesse C. Allen at the time, kind of gathered up a conglomeration of other prominent Black citizens in town. There was a doctor, there were two lawyers, there were farm owners at the time. And this was around 1920. So we’re talking right, you know, Jim Crow. And so these leaders in the community work together to raise money and to petition the school board to build a school for an actual campus for students to come and attend. And so, with the support from the local school board and the public education board, they were able to then petition the Rosenwald Fund and say, Hey, listen, we have support here. We have support from the community. We have support from the white community. We have support from the public education board, the superintendent here to create a school. And so the Rosenwald Fund granted that seed money, and this was at a time when the Rosenwald Fund was really starting to focus on county training schools. And so Hardeman County Training School became one of the first county training schools in the entire south for the Rosenwald Fund. So it almost acted like a prototype for this new era they were ushering in in the 1920s. Tell us a little bit about the Allen-White School. The first building on campus was called Dorris Hall, and it was completed in 1920. And it was actually the first brick Rosenwald building in Tennessee, and probably in the whole network of Rosenwald schools across the South. This was the first one that really had that institutional kind of school look to it in a rural setting, which is really cool. This specific school was an H plan. So basically, the way it looked is you walked in, and there was a central auditorium and some classrooms on each side kind of flanking either side of this auditorium, three on each side, as well as a library and a principal’s office. So that auditorium really, in the first 20 years of the school became the central meeting point in these classrooms, these six classrooms where all of the classes took place, and there was a library and there was the principal’s office. So it was not just a one room schoolhouse, as many people today kind of think of the Rosenwald schools as. It was actually a much bigger operational facility for the time.

Trudi Sandmeier 12:22
So what kinds of things did the students learn and study there?

Brannon Smithwick 12:25
So students got both a primary education and an industrial education. And so for the first few years of the school’s history, it only operated in kindergarten through about eighth grade. So students did their classic math, English, science, history, all of the, you know, liberal arts education that we receive today. But also on top of that, there was this industrial emphasis. So, the boys at the time would study agriculture and trade, so they would learn how to till fields, how to work the crops, you know how to use all of those tools. And then the trade students would learn carpentry, they would learn masonry, all of these different trades crafts, that actually helped to build the school itself. And the girls at the same time were learning domestic arts, as they would call it. So, you know, how to do laundry, how to cook and clean, you know, all of the things that were at the time typical for a female education.

Trudi Sandmeier 13:28
Yeah, the pathways for women in the workplace were pretty limited at that point. That fortunately changed as time passed. Did it stay one building? Or did did the campus grow?

Brannon Smithwick 13:39
It wasn’t until 1928, when James H. White came in as the new principal that things really started to change. And so, he was a scholar who came from Nashville. He finished his education at Columbia in New York. He was a Black teacher who came down and wanted to kind of really take over the operations at this school and grow it into a campus plant basically, a whole campus facility beyond the original Rosenwald building. And so he was the one who came in and really expanded it. And it wasn’t until 1931, that more grades were added to create a high school. So by 1932, Allen-White, as it was now known, was K through 12th grade.

Trudi Sandmeier 14:26
Principal White was a mover and a shaker. This guy got it done. So tell us a little bit about what he did and how the school changed under his leadership.

Brannon Smithwick 14:37
He sure did. Yeah, Principal White came in and kind of took the bull by the horns. Prior to this, the school had really been struggling. The parent teacher organization, and the board of trustees that had been established to build Dorris Hall originally had really been struggling to pay back some of the loans that they had received to complete the school. He came in and said if we’re going to make this a plant, we have to first pay that loan back and then go on from there and raise construction funds. And so Principal White was a really excellent fundraiser and a really excellent networker. And honestly a lot of his methods really mirrored that of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee and other Black educators at the time, who were working with anyone that was willing to talk and become involved in this — Black, white, it didn’t matter. And so, Principal White really got the community together and started an annual Thanksgiving rally, which became a huge fixture on campus every year, a giant blowout party with fundraising efforts, all sorts of different programming. They had pie struts and box lunch suppers and comedy shows and choral shows and competitions and all of these different things to raise money for, originally to pay back that loan, which they did in just one year, which is amazing.

Trudi Sandmeier 15:53
I know all of our listeners here on Save As well want to know, What in the world is a pie strut?

Brannon Smithwick 15:59
You know, it’s something that I’ve heard different explanations for from different community members. So I’m wondering myself even like what it entailed. Because I do think it’s something that evolved over the years, there was an element of cookery, but also dance involved with it. It was kind of like a cakewalk situation where you walk around and the last person gets pied in the face.

Trudi Sandmeier 16:23
Wow, it boggles the mind. I’m sure our listeners are imagining swirling, dancing pies in their minds as we speak. Okay. So back to the story. The school really grew and became integral to the community life of Whiteville. So what kinds of things were the students engaged in?

Brannon Smithwick 16:46
Yeah, so I think to answer your question, I first have to kind of talk about some of the buildings that were built. More academic buildings were built, a gymnasium was implemented into the original Dorris Hall Auditorium. And so that really sparked this era of athletics and social clubs. The basketball team at Allen-White throughout the 30s and 40s, was one of the best in the country. They won the national championship for both girls and boys in the late 30s, which is amazing. There were also choral performances. At one point, the school had enough money to even buy a bus to send choral students and comedy students around the state of Tennessee to do performances, which would in turn raise more money for the school. So it was just this kind of amazing social construct that they created here at Allen-White with athletics and clubs and academic clubs as well. But it was just a really amazing time to be in school here.

Trudi Sandmeier 17:45
So Allen-White was really known throughout this part of Tennessee, as an educational force.

Brannon Smithwick 17:53
Absolutely. The school became known throughout the South and throughout the country, for what what they were building and what they were doing and the graduates that were leaving and going on to college or going on to work in industrial jobs, but you know, owning their own farms or owning their own masonry businesses, or whatever it was that they were going on to do, these students were starting to branch out of Hardeman County and find opportunities all over the country, which then raised awareness about the school in Whiteville and gained a lot of attention from the Rockefeller Fund in New York, from other funds that were interested in getting involved in the mission at Allen-White to continue it growing, including the NYA program, the National Youth Administration, which was established during the Depression years, and really helped grow the school even more with students coming in from neighboring states and other parts of Tennessee, to get an education and to work at the school and get kind of job training experience to take into the world after they completed their studies at Allen-White. So it really became a beacon in the South as a county training school for K through 12 public education for Black students at the time.

Trudi Sandmeier 19:07
And people actually lived on campus, right?

Brannon Smithwick 19:10
Exactly. So during those Depression years, the New Deal NYA program that was established as part of that, the students of the school built dorms and then students from other areas would come and live in the dorms. The school really functioned 24 hours a day, and at its peak by around 1948 or 49, the school had grown from the one Dorris Hall building built in 1920 to about 11 buildings total on campus.

Trudi Sandmeier 19:40
You went and talked to people in Whiteville. Tell me about some of those conversations.

Brannon Smithwick 19:48
Yeah, it was really amazing to talk to the students. I interviewed about eight students in Whiteville. My mom had interviewed about 40, 27 of which went to the Allen-White Schools to see what they were up to now was really interesting.

Trudi Sandmeier 20:02
Oh, I can totally imagine.

Brannon Smithwick 20:04
Here’s a few stories from Ocie Holmes and Johnny Shaw about their time there.

Ocie Holmes 20:08
When we had break times, we would go to the library. But you know, you had to be really quiet. Miss Pratt is the one who told us about Black history. Miss Pratt would bring us all the pictures and tell us about our heritage and just made sure we knew our culture. She was a great librarian.

Johnny Shaw 20:27
Lunch times were kind of special for me because I got a chance to really gather with my friends who were not necessarily in the classroom with me. And I can remember sitting on the steps at lunchtime, waiting for my friends to come from other classes. And we would go out underneath the tree and sat ,especially warm days, and have our lunch, you know, little picnic lunches.

Ocie Holmes 20:53
There was one special teacher, Mr. Jesse Norman, he was really the catalyst that made me want to do more, be more and to become what I want it to be. Because he planted a seed in me. The first day I came to Allen-White I was in sixth grade. He gave a test the very first day. And I was like thinking, I don’t even have my books. And I don’t know, I’m not gonna do good on this test because I’m just starting. But I really aced it. I only missed one question. And he looked at my paper and he said, “This is your first day?” And, I said, “yes, sir.” And he told me, “young lady, you will do well,” and made me feel confidence in myself, and it carried me throughout my life.

Brannon Smithwick 21:39
Everyone, over and over and over again, I heard I would not be where I am today without Allen-White, without that confidence that the teachers and the staff instilled in me, without that belief that I know I could do anything with my education. So hearing those stories of uplift from within were incredible.

Trudi Sandmeier 21:59
So the Allen-White School was really at its peak in those postwar years. What happened to change that?

Brannon Smithwick 22:06
Yeah, so in 1954, everything really changed for public education, especially in the South. With Brown versus Board of Education, the court decided that segregation was unconstitutional. And so this was a time when desegregation was beginning to happen. Schools were starting to integrate, and things were starting to change for these Rosenwald-era schools that were so fervently established in the community. And so Allen-White was one of those schools. But in Hardeman County, it took almost 20 years to desegregate and to integrate into one consolidated school system. So Allen-White didn’t officially close the doors of its campus until 1974 as an educational facility. So it spanned almost the entirety of the 20th century as the school in the area for Black students.

Trudi Sandmeier 22:57
Did the African American community want to leave Allen-White?

Brannon Smithwick 23:04
This is a tough topic, because based on my research, they really didn’t, a lot of Black students would have preferred to stay at Allen-White. However, it’s a complex subject, because most community members I spoke to recognize that integration was the path forward, they recognize that this is how we strive toward equality. However, what they were worried about was their treatment in white schools, rightly so, feeling, you know, equal to their classmates, the fear of integration, the fear of violence and hostility.

Trudi Sandmeier 23:37
Absolutely.

Brannon Smithwick 23:38
But also the sadness and remorse about losing a place that they had already built so much community and they had already had all these social and, you know, athletic programs going and academic programming going. It was kind of an unraveling of something that they had worked so hard to build themselves that now was being taken away from them. So it was definitely a bittersweet thing for the Hardeman County community I think.

Trudi Sandmeier 24:18
What happened after the school closed its doors. Were the buildings in use at all?

Brannon Smithwick 24:23
There were only two left. One of them was the 1920 original Dorri Hall building, and the other one was the 1964 elementary school building. When the school closed, Dorris Hall kind of became a multipurpose space for various local community functions. The elementary school was purchased by the Whiteville Business Enterprise which was a conglomeration of Black business owners in Whiteville. There was a couple of different small businesses that operated out of that space for a few years. Until both of the buildings the campus was purchased by the Elcanaan Baptist Church, which was next door.

Trudi Sandmeier 25:02
Is the campus still owned by the church?

Brannon Smithwick 25:05
Yes, they’ve established a nonprofit organization called the Elcanaan Community Help Organization or ECHO for short. And so that is kind of the rallying group that is really working to conserve the school campus.

Trudi Sandmeier 25:19
So these are the local folks who are really organizing and making it happen.

Brannon Smithwick 25:25
Yeah, and just learning about their ongoing efforts to raise financing and raise funding and raise awareness and try and do everything they can to bring this school back to the way that they know it has been really powerful.

Trudi Sandmeier 25:39
So what kinds of things have the community done to start the conservation efforts?

Brannon Smithwick 25:44
So, in 2005, the community contacted Carroll Van West, who was a conservationist at Middle Tennessee State University’s Center for Historic Preservation. And he surveyed the building and actually wrote a National Register nomination for Dorris Hall, the original 1920 building. So based on his survey, Dorris Hall was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. So this was a really great win in their conservation efforts in Whiteville.

Trudi Sandmeier 26:16
The Allen-White School was an amazing place. But it had a couple of bumps along the way, including some damage to the buildings on the campus.

Brannon Smithwick 26:25
So the Allen-White School has suffered four alleged arson attacks. The first one being when it was still the Jesse C. Allen School for Colored Children. One building burned twice. After the school had been closed for a while, and conservation efforts were ongoing, the fourth arson attack occurred. And that was on the original Dorris Hall structure that had been built in 1920, that Rosenwald brick building. Luckily, it didn’t destroy the building entirely, it still remains as a shell. So that shifted the conservation efforts in a new direction after 2012. Evelyn Robertson, who’s spearheading a lot of this effort, spoke really eloquently of the reasons that the conservation of the school matters.

Evelyn Robertson 27:10
People forget the historical context of how we got from where we were to where we are. That school was a bridge that got us to where we were able to do some things on our own and do some things as a part of normal society. Without that school, these efforts, the things that we’re able to do today would not be possible. So it’s important to remember that it’s important not to forget that bridge that got us to where we are. And as a result of that, that’s why this is worth restoring. The blood, sweat, the tears, the efforts that were put forth by those individuals who could not get an education, who didn’t have an education, but who saw education is being valuable, that needs to be recognized, that needs to be memorialized. There needs to be some record associated with that particular effort, and how they were able to achieve the things that they achieved, which made it better for their children and grandchildren.

Trudi Sandmeier 28:24
So what’s there now is a 1960s building that has a roof and windows and all of those things, and then a brick shell of the original school building that is essentially a ruin. What happens next?

Brannon Smithwick 28:40
Yeah, that’s a really tough question to answer because there’s so many different avenues for what could happen next. How do we think about the physical space but also the intangible cultural memory of Allen-White, especially now that there’s very few buildings remaining, and the infrastructure has been so badly damaged. Currently, the community is hoping to reconstruct the original Dorris Hall building with the intention of turning it into a community center, a vocational training center and a social space. But in my thesis, I kind of introduced some alternative approaches and possibilities and ways to think about the school not only as this incredible place of education, but also as a site of conscience, which is a place that really addresses painful histories, and also uplifting histories and how they interact and correlate with one another, and how it can be both and really tell the greater story of resilience in the community. And so, I really urge the community in my thesis to consider alternative approaches, perhaps preservation as a ruin, perhaps rehabilitation to the existing building and conserving in different ways that can think about the school in its other layers of meaning that it now embodies after these attacks.

Trudi Sandmeier 30:07
So if our listeners wanted to help out ECHO and put a little money in the pot to help rehabilitate, or restore or preserve the Allen-White school, what would they do?

Brannon Smithwick 30:20
They can go to the allenwhitecenter.org. There is a link there with a PayPal donation section. There’s also the school history there. There’s some testimonial from former students. But right now the school community is really working on getting organized with digitizing some of those stories to try and conserve that intangible heritage that is at serious risk of erasure as these older generations continue to leave us. So this is the time where we’re starting to uncover those histories and to really work with communities and for communities to conserve their history.

Trudi Sandmeier 30:57
Thanks so much for coming to tell us this amazing story and to share all of your indepth research and effort that’s gone into your work.

Brannon Smithwick 31:07
Thanks for having me. It’s been a really gratifying project to work on. And I’m really hoping that some of my work will help push the needle forward as far as understanding these communities and the work that they’re doing to conserve these amazing places. So thank you.

Trudi Sandmeier 31:21
Thanks for coming to Save As.

Cindy Olnick 31:27
Oh, my gosh, Trudi, that is such a great story. Thank you so much to both of you for sharing it with us.

Trudi Sandmeier 31:34
I have to say, this was so inspiring to listen to the voices of the people whose lives were affected by this place, so clearly show how this school made a difference in their lives and the generations that have followed. It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It’s just so inspiring.

Cindy Olnick 32:00
Thank you all for listening to this episode. If you would like more information, and photos, please head over to the episode page at saveas.place. We know Rosenwald schools are a huge issue. We’ll put a few resources, send us your thoughts. Find us on the socials at Save As Next Gen on the Instagram and the Facebook. We would love to hear what you think.

Trudi Sandmeier 32:26
On our next episode, we’ll hear a little bit about the new legacy business programs that are popping up all around the U.S. but most specifically here in Los Angeles.

Xiaoling Fang 32:37
Many of this immigrants they went through such devastating traumatizing moments, and they show this resilience running across generations to keep their family business survive.

Cindy Olnick 32:54
And to make sure you don’t miss that episode, subscribe if you haven’t already, and feel free to tell a friend about Save As we would appreciate that.

Trudi Sandmeier 33:09
This episode was produced by the delightful Willa Seidenberg, with an assist from me, and some technical help from Victor Figueroa. Our original theme music is by Steven Conley with additional music for this episode by Danny Seidenberg. You can hear more at dannyseidenberg.com. Save As is a production of the Heritage Conservation program in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California.